‘Supreme Commander’ of Fake Army Marches Into Jail Cell

Behold, America, for a mighty general from a mighty fictitious army has fallen.

Yupeng Deng of Los Angeles pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges that he invented a fake army unit to dupe unsuspecting Chinese immigrants out of cash. Deng, who appointed himself the “supreme commander” of the phony outfit, is now headed to jail for theft by false pretenses, manufacturing deceptive government documents and counterfeit of an official government seal.

Deng called his fake outfit the “U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit” (MFSR) and held it out to Chinese immigrants as a glide path to U.S. citizenship. He charged each recruit between $300-400 to enlist and $120 a year for “renewal,” duping his victims into thinking they’d be eligible to become American citizens. Unfortunately for enlistees, that wasn’t the case. You have to be a members of the actual U.S. military to be eligible for expedited U.S. citizenship, and need to be at least a permanent resident alien.

You can’t just put on a scam without any props and hope to keep making money. So Deng went the whole nine yards and outfitted his office like a recruitment center. He dressed up 200 of his victims in military uniforms, gave them fake IDs and paraded them around Monterey Park without them ever knowing they’d been duped.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Deng’s lawyer originally tried to get him out of hot water by claiming that he hadn’t actually told his victims they were signing up for a real army at all. Nope, he was just recruiting for the special forces wing of a pseudo Salvation Army. It was all just a misunderstanding premised on Deng’s sincere desire to do charity work, his lawyer claimed. But that argument fell apart with yesterday’s guilty plea, leaving Deng with a sentence of three years in prison for his crimes.

It’s not just mustering a fake army unit that’s putting supreme commander Deng behind bars, though. He’s also going down for some pretty gross conduct that’s unbecoming of even a phony officer and a gentlemen. While raiding his command headquarters — erm, home — the feds found a stash of child pornography on his home computer.

The Defense Department, which helped investigate the case through the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, was particularly irritated by the scam because of its potential to impact legitimate recruitment efforts. Shortly after Deng’s arrest, military recruiters reached out to the local Asian community to try and undo any damage that may have been done by Deng’s misinformation.